Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Barbee joined the NAACP at age twelve. He served in the United States Navy from 1943 to 1946. In 1949 he graduated from all-black LeMoyne-Owen College and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin Law School, but he soon dropped out due to the racial prejudice of some faculty and students. Later he returned to the UW. In 1955 he was elected president of the Madison chapter of the NAACP, and he completed law school in 1956. In 1962 Barbee moved to Milwaukee, which was very racially segregated. In 1963, working for the NAACP, he challenged the Milwaukee Public Schools to integrate. The school system refused, claiming that the segregation of its schools resulted not from its policies, but from segregated neighborhoods. In response Barbee organized civil rights activists into the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee, which organized boycotts of the schools and blocked buses, aiming to bring attention to the problem. In 1964 Barbee ran to represent what was then the 6th district in the Wisconsin State Assembly and won. From 1965 to 1977 he was the only African-American in the state legislature. During that time he introduced a State Fair Housing bill, and worked for fair employment, gay rights, women's rights, prison reform, legalization of drugs and prostitution, disarming police officers, and taxation of churches. The school boycotts did not sway Milwaukee's school board, so in 1965 Barbee filed a federal lawsuit Amos et al. v. Board of School Directors of the City of Milwaukee, arguing that MPS's neighborhood school policy did indeed preserve and intensify school segregation. This claim was supported by research conducted by Barbee, Marilyn Morheuser and MUSIC volunteers. The case ground on for years, with Barbee often working alone against MPS's lawyers, but in 1976 federal judge John Reynolds ruled in favor of Barbee: "I have concluded that segregation exists in the Milwaukee public schools and that this segregation was intentionally created and maintained by the defendants." MPS appealed the decision all the way to the Supreme Court, but that court supported Judge Reynold's judgment and Barbee's case. In 1979 MPS agreed to change its policies, and began making progress toward integrating its schools. In later years Barbee continued his law practice. From 1978 to 2000 he taught in the Africology department at UW-Milwaukee, and he continued to work for justice and social change in Milwaukee until he died in 2002.
